Page 24 of Taken By the Alien Killer
Between clusters of dignitaries she glances back, tiny flicks of attention like a radio pinging a tower: You there? I am there, and I am unreadable because that is what is required. Kaspian catches one of those glances and almost turns, then decides not to interfere and settles on naming every archivist he met by their chosen pronouns. It’s a diplomatic flex; it works. The archivists like him. That should please me. It pleases me the way a bruise pleases when pressed.
We move through corridors of curated history—murals of first planting, glass cases holding tools, a dedication plaque etched deep enough to last through the next century’s earthquakes. I check sight lines, count cameras, feel the minute shift in the air when a door seals just a fraction too slow. When we step back into the brightness, Sneed peels off to bully a transport schedule, leaving me to shadow in his absence. Star falls back a half pace and tries to catch me at the seam between groups.
“Commander,” she says lightly, like she’s about to ask me to rate the pastries again, and then lets the word hang in the sun. “Our next stop?”
“Crystal Gardens,” I answer. My voice is even, nonabrasive, the kind you can pour over raw stone without losing any. “Security sweep complete. We’ll enter at the east gate.”
“Wonderful,” she says, and the smile she gives me is a thing I have to look at slant, because taken straight on it loosens bolts. “I’ve heard there’s a new exhibit. The one with the frost bloom.”
Kaspian materializes at her side out of sheer practice. “I was told it hums at a frequency that calms the nervous system,” he says, then glances over his shoulder to me with a courtesy that is both wise and infuriating. “Commander, do you hum at that frequency?”
“I have no frequency,” I say. It draws a small laugh from Star, a ghost of the old chessboard cadence. I do not allow it to land anywhere that can bruise.
The Gardens are a cathedral of glass and minerals, a place where engineers and horticulturists conspired to coax geology into bloom. The air is wet and clean, the kind of humidity that sits on your skin like a benevolent hand. Veins of quartz climb trellises; geodes have been split open and taught to grow out instead of in; crystal lattices arch into canopies that ring faintly when the microclimate shifts. Every step sinks soft into moss engineered to tolerate foot traffic and politics. Docent drones bob along the paths like attentive dragonflies; their recorded voices never rise above respectful awe.
Star’s hair gathers the greenhouse light and throws it back in a color that never appears in nature without consequence. She stops at a towering agate “tree,” its bands a confection of honey and smoke, and lays her palm on the smooth edge as if it might have a pulse. “They cultivated this from a shard,” she says, to no one and everyone. “You can teach rock to change its mind if you give it enough time.”
Kaspian tips his head. “Do you think that’s true for people?”
“Rocks don’t have schedules,” she says, which is both a joke and an indictment and it lands with a little silence after it. I let my eyes pass over the upper catwalks—clean—and the condensation gutters overhead—functioning—and the couple in matching travel cloaks who aren’t part of our party—tourists, harmless, but I mark their faces and their rings out of habit.
The frost bloom sits in a domed transept, guarded by low rails and polite signs about not breathing too close to the structure. Inside the glass bell, the crystalline bush breathes white, extruding glittering filaments that branch and branch again into lace. The sound it makes is barely sound: a whisper of glass singing, the pitch right at the edge of what my ears want. I feel it in the cartilage along my horns; I feel it in the scar on my brow, a minute smoothing, like a finger over a jagged seam.
Star leans over the rail and exhales. Her breath fogs the bell and clears; new frost scribbles itself where the fog cooled the surface. She smiles the way people smile at babies they’re not ready to want. Kaspian looks from the bloom to her and then steps back to give her the space to have the moment. In that small self-erasure he makes himself kinder than some men twice his size will ever be.
We move on when the docent drones shift lighting to demonstrate a phase change. The path narrows between two walls of citrine that catch the sun and pour it down on us in syrupy sheets. It is here, with the group strung out along the display placards and Kaspian momentarily detained by a passionate horticulturist eager to discuss the ethics of gem-seeding, that Star slows again. She waits until the others round the bend and the whispering of the frost bloom hides our voices.
“What did I do?” she asks, just like that, no dance, no preamble, the fragile edge of sleep still on her voice from the night I didn’t let myself think about. The words hit me at a slant; I brace.
I should say nothing. That is the plan. The only plan that avoids fire. I keep my face arranged and my weight centered and my hands open, empty of weapons and argument. I think of last night’s form, submitted and sent. I think of the exit interview that will ask me to account for ten years as if they were a ledger and not a life.
She steps closer, not enough to breach protocol, enough to alter the air. Up close, the humidity makes the loose strands at her temples curl; a flake of glitter hangs on her cheekbone like a stubborn star. When she looks at me like this, not the way a noble looks at a guard but the way a person looks at a precipice she might jump and might not, my discipline becomes a machine I have to keep feeding with my own teeth.
“Rayek,” she says, and it cracks the surface of my calm because she uses my name and not my rank, and because she is not angry so much as hurt and confused and trying not to be either. “I keep asking myself—did I step wrong? Did I say something? Is this me? Are you—” Her mouth compresses on a word I don’t let her finish. I don’t deserve to hear it. “What did I do?”
Silence is my last weapon that won’t harm her. I hold it, but the truth has other ways of leaving a body. My eyes betray me. They flicker over the edge of her shoulder to the spot where the path turns; they drop a fraction when she saysme; they hold too long on the place her pulse strikes under delicate skin; they do all the telling my mouth refuses. Her breath shudders, so slight a person not listening for it would miss. Of all the battles I’ve lost, this quiet one feels the least honorable.
Kaspian’s voice arrives like a bell that remembers its job. “Lady Star?” He appears at the mouth of the citrine lane, not rushing, but with enough urgency to make the moment buckle. The horticulturist drones behind him, apologizing for the detour and offering a pamphlet full of diagrams and good intentions. “There’s a curator who’d very much like to meet you. Something about the west wing’s funding. I told him you’d be delighted to inflict an opinion on him.”
She blinks once, looks at me as if I might rescind the past minute by saying a single syllable, and then the look shutters. The smile she puts on is so perfect it should be framed. “I’malways ready to inflict,” she says, and the joke lands on Kaspian the way she meant it to. He offers his arm; she does not take it, but she walks beside him with matching step and her head tipped just so. The curator talks about diffusion rates and donor names. The citrine throws sunlight after them like coins. I swallow nothing.
The silence that follows us home is not a flavor I like, but I know it. It coats the inside of a car, makes the upholstery smell like civility. It rides the lift like an extra passenger. It changes the acoustics of a room full of crystal and makes every chime sound a fraction off-key. In the afternoon, during a courtesy call at the west farms co-op, Star answers a child’s question about soil with such bright competence the room forgets to breathe; then she forgets me for five seconds and I feel human. When she remembers I exist, I turn back into a wall and the human is sentenced back to his cell.
Sneed maintains a perfect distance and a perfect disinterest; he is a metronome disguised as a man. Kaspian is polite enough to pretend not to notice that something has cracked and we are waiting to see if it can be mended with string.
By evening my slate carries the weight I asked it to. The message pings against my ribs in my coat pocket while I stand outside the east saloon and count the guests drifting in for a small private hour. I wait until the corridor is empty before I thumb the screen awake. The crest blooms. The text is brief in the way only bureaucracy can manage when it means to change your life:Senior Protector Rayek of Vakut—Request for reassignment RECEIVED. Tentative approval granted pending exit interview, debrief audit, and transfer logistics. Report 1100 tomorrow to Office of Personnel for preliminary processing. Until then all posted duties remain in effect. Thank you for your service.
There is a button to confirm I have read it. I press it and feel nothing happen. Somewhere behind the saloon door Kaspian laughs at something my Baron says; it is a sound that would make most men proud of their diplomacy. The cypress beyond the parapet tosses its head in a wind I can’t taste because the air in the corridor has been scrubbed clean of anything messier than lemon.
It feels like exile when I name it honestly in my head. It feels like failure when I don’t.
I slide the slate back into my pocket and resume my post. A footman passes, balancing a tray like a planet on his palm. The door opens, spills warm conversation, closes. A dragonfly drone charts the corridor and corrects. I set my boots where the next hour will be and I stand there, every muscle obedient, every sense tuned to the jobs that remain. Above the sea, the sky bruises into evening. Inside my chest, the chain I chose goes taut and holds.
CHAPTER 7
STAR
The house feels wrong, like someone tuned it to a key I can’t sing in. Voices blur behind doors; silver clinks in rooms I don’t enter; every corridor smells faintly of lemons and lies. I float through it, useless and pretty, dodging questions like holograms.
